Béla Balázs

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Béla Balázs around 1910

Béla Balázs [ ˈbeːlɒ ˈbɒlaːʒ ] (born Herbert Bauer on August 4, 1884 in Szeged , Austria-Hungary ; died May 17, 1949 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian film critic , esthete , writer , screenwriter , librettist , director and poet .

Life

Herbert Bauer was the son of the grammar school teacher Simon Bauer , the father was of Hungarian-Jewish origin, the mother of German-Jewish origin. His siblings were the writer Hilda Bauer (1887–1965) and the biologist Ervin Bauer (1890–1938). German was spoken in the family, but he wanted to become a Hungarian writer himself and Magyarized his name. He attended the German elementary school in Lőcse and the middle school in Szeged . He studied in Budapest, Berlin (among others with Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey ) and Paris (with Henri Bergson ) and began a career as a Hungarian writer (dramas, poetry, fairy tales and novellas).

Béla Balázs wrote the libretti for the ballet The Wood-Carved Prince and for the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle , which were set to music by Béla Bartók , as well as the fairy tale cycle The Mantle of Dreams . From 1915, meetings of the informal “Sunday Circle” (Vasárnap-Társaság) took place in his Budapest apartment, which were dominated by his friend György Lukács , among the participants were Karl Mannheim , Béla Fogarasi , Frederick Antal and his girlfriend at the time Anna Lesznai .

In 1918 he became a member of the Hungarian Communist Party, in 1931 a member of the KPD . In 1919 he fled to Vienna after the short-lived Soviet republic , in which he had been a member of the board of directors of writers and people's commissar for education and popular culture, where he first tried to gain a foothold as a playwright and fairy tale author. This was followed by three decades of exile, in which he was forced to return to the German language in his publications, while he continued to write fiction literature in Hungarian.

Chance brought him together with the new medium of film. He began to regularly write film reviews for the newspaper Der Tag and at the same time made a name for himself as a screenwriter. His first film-theoretical work, The Visible Man (1924), published in Vienna, founded modern film theory, in which romantic motifs of a longing to overcome alienation in a visual culture mixed with political hopes for a popular medium of the Enlightenment.

In 1926 Balázs moved to Berlin, where his second book on film theory, Der Geist des Films (1930), was written. Balázs also worked as a screenwriter in Berlin. B. for the film adaptation of the Threepenny Opera (by GW Pabst ), which led to a heated controversy with Bertolt Brecht. In 1931 he wrote the screenplay for Leni Riefenstahl's directorial debut, The Blue Light (1932). During the completion of the film, which he was also involved in directing, he was invited to Moscow to make a film about the "Council Revolution" in Hungary. As a Jew and Communist, a return to Germany was impossible for him in 1933 and he stayed in Moscow. When he returned to Budapest in 1945, he was able to make one of his most famous films: Somewhere in Europe , 1947. In the same year, his autobiographical novel The Youth of a Dreamer was published .

In 1949 he received Hungary's highest honor, the Kossuth Prize , and the 1958 Béla Balázs Prize for merits in the art of film was named after him. The artistic film studio in Budapest also bears his name.

Bronze portrait of Balázs by Sándor Tóth in Szeged

Film theory

Balázs' main work on film theory, The Visible Man or the Culture of Film (1924), focuses heavily on the aspect of physiognomy . On the one hand, his arguments concern the actor in the field of tension between "type" and expression. Helmut H. Diederichs sees "[t] he physiognomics (Lavater, the young Goethe)" as the basis of Balázs' physiognomics .

Sabine Hake identifies the sources of his ideas in philosophy of life and gestalt psychology. An omnipresent movement of life and the abstracted and abstractable form of the living are further physiognomic aspects that co-establish this film theory. On the other hand - and this is Balázs' genuine contribution to the early theory formation of the moving image - he emphasizes the anthropomorphization of everything visible in the cinematic staging. He calls this the "latent physiognomy" and the "face of things". Hanno Loewy remarks on this that on the part of the viewer "the psychic cathexis relates indifferently to the entire perceived scene and thus indifferently to things and beings that appear in it". Daniel Hermsdorf sums up Balázs' conception to the effect that Balázs terms, "- if at all marked in their discursive origin, then not reflected at all or rather carelessly - refer back to a precarious ideological field of physiognomic theories". In this respect, film aesthetics also move between a playful humanization and a psychopathological mode of perception, as Karl Jaspers first analyzed differently in the specialist literature in “Allgemeine Psychopathologie” (1913) - as “affect illusion” and “ pareidolia ”.

Balázs himself calls the anthropomorphic image effect “transcendent and spooky”. Balázs 'friend Lukács said - one year before Balázs' publication The Visible Man - from a Marxist perspective on the capitalist economy that it causes the “transformation of the commodity relationship into a thing of 'ghostly objectivity'”, which “affects the whole consciousness of man their structure ”. Hermsdorf therefore comes to the conclusion that Baláz's film theory is "a fetish carved out of the terms of his time, which, under literary polish, follows an inverse logical strategy of Marxist criticism of exchange value and compatible cultural theories."

Balázs is still respected today when there are generally contradicting readings and evaluations. Thomas Koebner sees in The Visible Man with its “intermingling of enthusiasm and insight, the first demanding and detailed appreciation of film as a new art […]. The theses of Balázs can be found in almost all later published studies (to their advantage). "

Fonts

  • The visible person or the culture of the film. German-Austrian publishing house, Vienna a. a. 1924 (several new editions). ( Digitized version of the German National Library .)
  • The spirit of the movie. Knapp, Halle (Saale) 1930 (several new editions).
  • A dreamer's youth. Globus-Verlag, Vienna 1947 (new edition: The youth of a dreamer. Autobiographical novel (= Béla Balázs: Selected literary works in individual editions. Vol. 1). Edited by Hanno Loewy . Verlag Das Arsenal, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-931109-19 -4 ).
  • A Baedeker of the soul. And other features from the years 1920–1926 (= Béla Balázs: Selected literary works in individual editions. Vol. 2). Edited by Hanno Loewy. Verlag Das Arsenal, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-931109-30-5 ).
  • The story of Logodygasse, of spring, of death and of the distance. Novellas (= Béla Balázs: Selected literary works in individual editions. Vol. 3). Edited by Hanno Loewy. Verlag Das Arsenal, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-931109-31-3 ).
  • The holy robber and other fairy tales (= Béla Balázs: Selected literary works in individual editions. Vol. 4). Edited by Hanno Loewy. Verlag Das Arsenal, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-931109-37-2 ).
  • The winner. The fairy tale of the bear, the wolf and the clever fox. In: Bernd Dolle, Dieter Richter , Jack Zipes (eds.): "It will be once ..." Social fairy tales of the twenties (= collection of old children's books. Vol. 8). Weismann, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-921040-29-9 , pp. 7-16.
  • The intellectual's fear of socialism. In: The world stage. 28th year, 1932, (4 parts) pp. 93-96; 131-134; Pp. 166-168; Pp. 207-210. Verlag der Weltbühne, Charlottenburg (Reprint: Athenäum Verlag, Königstein / Ts 1978, ISBN 3-7610-9301-2 or 3-7610-9300-4).

literature

  • Balázs, Béla. In: Lexicon of socialist German literature. From the beginning to 1945. Monographic-biographical presentations. 2nd Edition. VEB Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1964, pp. 78–80.
  • Helmut H. Diederichs: Béla Balázs and his contribution to form-aesthetic film theory. Lecture on November 20, 1997 in Berlin ( fh-dortmund.de ).
  • Daniel Hermsdorf: film image and body world. Anthropomorphism in natural philosophy, aesthetics and media theory of modernity (= film - medium - discourse. Vol. 34). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4462-5 (also: Paderborn, University, dissertation, 2010).
  • Thomas Koebner : The film as a new art - reactions of literary intelligence. On the theory of the silent film (1911–24). In: Helmut Kreuzer (Ed.): Literary Studies - Media Studies (= Medium Literature. Vol. 6). Quelle & Meyer, Heidelberg 1977, ISBN 3-494-00889-2 , pp. 1–31.
  • Attila Endre Láng : Béla Balázs as film critic and film aesthetician submitted by Attila E. Láng . Vienna, Univ., Diss., 1974.
  • Hanno Loewy: Béla Balázs - fairy tales, ritual and film. Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-930916-53-3 (At the same time: Konstanz, University, dissertation, 1999: Medium and Initiation - Béla Balázs: fairy tales, aesthetics, cinema. D-nb.info ).
  • Balázs, Béla. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 1: A-Benc. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-598-22681-0 , pp. 316-324.
  • Jörg Marquardt: Bálasz, Béla. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , pp. 23-25.

Web links

Commons : Béla Balázs  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1931: The blue light. (No longer available online.) Estate of Walter Riml, archived from the original on February 22, 2014 ; Retrieved on February 17, 2014 (historical outline, still photos and work photos by Walter Riml). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / walter-riml.at
  2. ↑ Béla Balázs: The visible man or the culture of the film (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1536). With an afterword by Helmut H. Diederichs and contemporary reviews by Robert Musil, Andor Kraszna-Krausz, Siegfried Kracauer and Erich Kästner. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-29136-X , p. 38.
  3. ↑ Helmut H. Diederichs: Introduction. In: Béla Balázs: Writings on the film. Volume 1: “The visible human being”. Reviews and articles 1922–1926. Hanser, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-446-12870-0 , p. 36.
  4. ^ Sabine Hake: The Cinema's Third Machine. Writing on Film in Germany 1907-1933. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE et al. a. 1993, ISBN 0-8032-2365-X , p. 230 f.
  5. ↑ Béla Balázs: The visible man or the culture of the film (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1536). With an afterword by Helmut H. Diederichs and contemporary reviews by Robert Musil, Andor Kraszna-Krausz, Siegfried Kracauer and Erich Kästner. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-29136-X , p. 59.
  6. ^ Hanno Loewy: Béla Balázs - fairy tales, ritual and film. 2003, p. 295.
  7. ^ Daniel Hermsdorf: Film image and body world. 2011, p. 336.
  8. ↑ Karl Jaspers : General Psychopathology. For students, doctors and psychologists. 2nd, revised edition. Springer, Berlin 1920, p. 41. See also Daniel Hermsdorf: Filmbild und Körperwelt. 2011, p. 562 f.
  9. ↑ Béla Balázs: The visible man or the culture of the film (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1536). With an afterword by Helmut H. Diederichs and contemporary reviews by Robert Musil, Andor Kraszna-Krausz, Siegfried Kracauer and Erich Kästner. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-29136-X , p. 73.
  10. ^ Georg Lukács: History and Class Consciousness . Studies on Marxist dialectics (= Luchterhand Collection. Vol. 11). Special edition, 3rd edition. Luchterhand, Darmstadt u. a. 1975, ISBN 3-472-61011-5 , p. 194.
  11. ^ Daniel Hermsdorf: Film image and body world. 2011, p. 337.
  12. ^ Thomas Koebner: The film as a new art - reactions of literary intelligence. On the theory of the silent film (1911–24). In: Helmut Kreuzer (Ed.): Literary Studies - Media Studies (= Medium Literature. Vol. 6). Quelle & Meyer, Heidelberg 1977, ISBN 3-494-00889-2 , pp. 1–31, here p. 6.
personal data
SURNAME Balázs, Béla
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bauer, Herbert (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian film critic, esthete, writer and poet
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Szeged
DATE OF DEATH May 17, 1949
Place of death Budapest